It’s simple. We will not be successful in confronting the climate crisis without empowering women. Meeting our climate and development goals will depend on it.
There is a tendency to think of women mostly as victims of climate change. It is true that many, especially more vulnerable women, face disproportionate risks. A female smallholder farmer in a poor and fragile country where constant drought beats the soil into dust is likely to suffer intensely from a climate crisis that she did little to cause. She is also likely to have fewer assets, opportunities and even legal rights to minimize the impact of such climate events. cope with climate.
But this part of the story is not enough. Equally important is recognizing that women are change makers, providers of solutions. When women’s voices are heard, when women can make decisions, where they are given a chance to enhance their asset position and have livelihood opportunities economies grow, poverty is reduced, social mobility is improved and we are most likely to be on low-carbon development paths.
At the Climate Investment Funds, across our programs, we invest in gender-transformative changes for individual women and men, their communities, and local and national institutions. Every single project we propose, review, fund, implement and monitor is expected to propel gender equality gains. Women acquire more control of assets such as land and capital, greater voice and leadership in governance, and livelihoods that build on new skills and productive capacities to withstand sudden shocks.
We also constantly call for women’s climate leadership, from local-level groups to manage resources, to decision-making around district-level social protection programs, to national climate planning. Women not only have a right to be in the places that make decisions for everyone, but also often bring perspectives and insights that would otherwise be overlooked, rendering the response incomplete.
Our support to the Government of Mexico, for instance, acts on two fronts. One involves institutional reforms at the National Forestry Commission to develop gender-responsive planning and budgeting and staff capacity on gender. The other extends into local communities, where we support women as leaders and participants in local forest governance, and open access to business training and credit for women’s forest-based enterprises.
In Burkina Faso, economic activities tied to forests generate a quarter of rural household incomes and nearly 6 percent of gross domestic product. Women in particular rely on non-timber forest products, including for food security. And yet they struggle with constrained access to and control over forest resources. The CIF helped introduce a payment for ecosystem services scheme to reduce poverty and enhance food security while regenerating ecosystems and bolstering climate resilience. Women producers of shea butter quickly made the most of new opportunities, quadrupling their revenue from $5 to $20 a day. That’s money that will go towards housing and education and health care, delivering lasting benefits for women and their families.
These projects may seem like a drop in the ocean. But they prove to governments that women’s empowerment is integral to achieving economic, social and climate ambitions. They take down one of the biggest barriers, which is the assumption that climate action is somehow gender blind. In practice, that means women usually get left out, and climate action cannot work as hard and effectively as it must.
Providing women with access to finance is especially crucial. Both financial and non-financial barriers, from collateral requirements to discriminatory norms about women borrowers, have hurt women’s access to date, which diminishes their ability to cope with climate change.
In Tajikistan, a CIF-backed project called CLIMADAPT provided an initial credit line of $10 million open to male and female farmers, owners of small and medium enterprises, and individual household members. They could apply for financing for diverse climate-resilience technologies, such as more efficient water and energy systems. But instead of assuming that it would be enough to provide finance to anyone who applied for it, the project deliberately trained intermediary bank staff on better outreach to potential women customers. They established customized women-only counter services, for instance, and supported women borrowers through guidance on business development.
Impact studies showed that 30 percent of borrowers were women, an unusually high share. Women reported productivity gains and, crucially from an empowerment angle, an improved ability to influence household financial decisions. The project has been scaled up in the country and beyond by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and others.
Stories like these testify to how empowering a woman changes her life and that of her household for the better. Businesses and communities thrive. And new practices take root to slow climate change and put development on a more sustainable path.
Linking these different dimensions takes commitment. It calls for engagement, institutional support, good governance and transparency, and solid policies and practices around gender equality and inclusion. I am proud to say that CIF has been lauded in these areas, and we continue to push forward in the run-up now to COP26, in Just Transition efforts and the green recovery, and more. We are keen to partner and continue deepening dialogue with diverse groups from civil society and the private sector.
Above all, we are prepared to listen to and invest in the priorities of all those who get up each day to make a living, manage disaster risks, make food security decisions, steer choices on water and energy use, and the list goes on. That fundamentally includes women. From households to the highest echelons of leadership, women will drive transformation. The stakes have never been higher, and the achievement of gender equality never more imperative than now.